From silver to silicon

From silver to silicon

400 years ago, when Galileo Galilei wanted to show others what he saw through his telescope, he had to make drawings. The pockmarked face of the Moon, the dance of the Jovian satellites, sunspots or the stars in Orion.

He took his drawings and published them in a small book, The Starry Messenger. That was the only way he could share his discoveries with others.

For well over two centuries, astronomers also had to be artists. Peering through their eyepieces, they made detailed drawings of what they saw. And sometimes they over-interpreted what they saw. Dark linear features on the surface of Mars were thought to be canals suggesting civilised life on the surface of the red planet.

We now know that the canals were an optical illusion. What astronomers really needed was an objective way to record the light collected by the telescopes without the information first having to pass through their brains and their drawing pens.

Photography came to the rescue.

The Eyes on the Skies is a movie produced as standard DVD and Blu-ray format, freely available for TV broadcasters and for public events carried out by educators, science centres, planetariums, amateur astronomers etc. (send your email, postal address plus a justification to us ). It explores the many facets of the telescope — the historical development, the scientific importance, the technological breakthroughs, and also the people behind this ground-breaking invention, their triumphs and failures. It is presented by Dr. J, aka Dr. Joe Liske, a professional astronomer from the European Southern Observatory and host of the Hubblecast video podcast.